Tag Archives: Lead Adventure Forum

I posted my Round 1 entry for the recently concluded Lead Painters League 11 (run over on the awesome Lead Adventure Forum) way back in mid-April but never got around to posting my other entries.

So here they are all at once, including Round 1 again for completeness sake.

Note that I repeated one entry in a later round, so there are only nine entries here instead of ten. My Round 2 entry, Patients of Ward 13, were re-run as my Round 9 entry after the English Civil War musketeers I’d hoped to run didn’t get finished in time. Interestingly, the Patients lost their initial round but won their re-appearance, which is unusual as repeat figures rarely win LPL rounds in my experience!

There’s captions for each photo with more details, including manufacturer info for all the figures.

LPL11 Round 2 – The Patients of Ward 13. Statuesque Miniature’s Pulp Asylum line, 28mm. A strong contender for my favourite set of figures in my LPL11 entries, and they also wound up being my Round 9 entry after the planned ECW figures didn’t get finished in time.

The Lead Adventure Forum runs a great painting contest about once a year called the Lead Painter’s League. I’ve participated before but not for a number of years now, but when LPL11 was announced a while ago I decided to get back at it and enter.

LPL was originally conceived as a way to help participants clear their stockpiles and lead mountains of figures, so the requirements for small groups of figures – the minimum entry has to be five figures – and relatively loose theme allow you to paint whatever you feel like. There’s bonus rounds with slightly more specific themes on the first, fifth, and tenth round but they’re intentionally loose as well. This year’s bonus themes are Tribes for Round One, Ship’s Crew for Round Five, and Big Brother/Little Brother for Round 10.

I was able to get ten rounds worth of figures together, including satisfying all three bonus rounds, just from my stockpile of figures, in classic LPL style!

For Round One, Tribes, I used a family group of cavemen (cavepersons?) that Bob Murch of Pulp Figures sculpted. There’s a grizzled old shaman, an older woman, a young mother with baby on her hip, a teenage boy, and a younger child. I think they’re some of Bob’s older sculpts and it looks like he’s taken them out of circulation at the moment – which means we might see resculpts sometime soon!

Old Sabertooth’s Clan, my Round One entry for LPL11. Click for larger.

There’s been a dozen or more Infinity figures and a scattering of other stuff on my workbench this whole time, but the only figures I’ve painted have been the six goblins for the Blomp, five of which were really simple paint jobs, really just two colours and some washes! My painting mojo has been in hibernation all winter…

Then Lead Painters League 11 was announced over on the Lead Adventure Forum. I’ve participated in previous LPL rounds but not for a number of years now – LPL3, LPL5, LPL7 – so I wanted to get back into that particular groove, and allows me to continue my “tradition” of participating in odd-numbered LPL rounds.

I realized that if I dug into my lead mountain stockpile of figures I could do every single round of this LPL including meeting the three bonus rounds (Tribes, Ship’s Crew, and Big Brother/Little Brother) without having to buy a single figure, and by pulling out figures I’d started to paint years ago then abandoned I could reduce the painting load considerably!

The first thing I did, though, was clear all the Infinity figures off my workbench. They’ll be back, no worries, but I realized that my painter’s block was at least partly linked to the fact that for most of the last two years nearly all I’ve painted has been Infinity figures for one faction. They’re lovely figures and I’ve done a lot of painting on them I’m happy with, but a massive changeup was clearly needed!

The workbench this week! Click for larger, details in text.

I pulled a whole mix of stuff out, began working on it, and the painting mojo came roaring back! There’s some Warlord ECW/TYW figures, a mix of figures from Pulp Figures, some fishmen types from Reaper, and a few other things from other manufacturers. I’ve applied more paint to more figures in the past five days than I have in the past four months!

Part of this painting spree will see the table at Trumpeter Salute 2017 at the end of this month – more on that in another post soon.

Back to the Russian Civil War again this LPL round with some Copplestone 28mm Bolsheviks. I really like the whole Copplestone Back of Beyond range, even the “rank and file” infantry have loads of character and lots of really nice details.

28mm Bolsheviks from Copplestone. Click for full size, as usual.

The tan background and khaki on the Bolshies gives this photo quite a nice sepia tone overall; that wasn’t really planned but looks good!

Round Seven of the LPL is up, and here’s my entry. These guys are 28mm U.S. Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. I used the famous movie The Sand Pebbles as my source for the uniform colours, as I’m pretty sure Bob Murch did when he sculpted these figures.

The all-white uniform is striking, but hard to do and keep interesting. I used a couple of shades of Reaper Master Series paint – they have a very nice triad of off-whites – and these sailors have come up very nicely.

28mm US Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. Click for full size, as usual.

Over to fantasy figures for the first time in this LPL for me, with a team of Reaper dwarves. Lovely figures loaded with detail, as you’d expect from Reaper. These short fellows are a lot of fun to paint, although picking out all the buckles, belt bags and bits can seem like an endless process.

The Blackstone Guard – Reaper Minis dwarven fighters. Click to see full size, as usual.

I’ve painted these warriors up in almost all black livery, although the main colour on them is their extravagant dwarven beards and long hair. Apparently this particular clan of dwarves runs strongly toward red hair.

Round Five of LPL7 was one of three Theme Rounds; this time the theme was “Historical Civil Wars”. This fits perfectly into my ongoing Russian Civil War project, and was one of the reasons I pushed myself to participate in this year’s LPL.

I pulled out some RCW figures that I’d finished very quickly and roughly, stripped them, and repainted them to a much, much higher standard. The main scene depicts a group of raiding Cossack cavalrymen coming around the corner of a village church to find the locals armed and waiting for them, with a big farm wagon pushed across the road as a barricade.

The local militia are Copplestone Castings Russian Partisan figures; they’re great figures loaded with character. I own twenty or thirty of these guys (at least two packs worth, maybe three, I’ve lost track!) and I have very few duplicate figures in that collection. I pulled out seven favourite poses to repaint for this scene. I painted them up as a mix of young men & old. The young men would likely be returned frontovik (Russian veterans of the Great War) or, if this is a Bolshevik militia, young radical Bolshies come out from the cities. There were rural militias for every political flavour of the Russian Civil War, and quite a lot of no distinct flavour at all — the “Greens”, who were either peasant militias formed for self-defence or anti-revolutionary bandits, depending on who was telling the story!

The Cossacks are from Brigade Games. Brigade’s Russian Civil War/WW1 in the East range doesn’t get as much attention as the Copplestone Back of Beyond ranges, but there are some lovely figures in that range, including these fairly recent Cossack cavalrymen. There’s a pack of regular riders with swords and slung rifles, and a command pack with officer, trumpeter and standard bearer; all six of these guys are from the regular Cossack pack. They’re very nice figures, a bit more fine-boned than the Copplestone figures but very compatible. The one downside to these Cossack figures is that some of the details are quite delicate, especially the sabres and scabbards.

By the time you read this my Round Six figures will be competing in the LPL; head over to the Lead Adventure Forum to see how they’re doing!

Most of the skin tone comes from W&N Burnt Umber acrylic artist’s ink, applied nearly full-strength over a basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown with a quick highlight (before the ink goes on) of Reaper Oiled Leather. The hair is mostly Reaper Walnut Brown, which is a very-nearly-black dark brown.

Unfortunately for them, these skulking murderers ran straight into a really spectacular group of cavalry from one of the best painters in the contest, and got soundly thrashed, although lots of people said nice things about them! Luck of the draw; I’m a pretty solidly middle-of-the-road painter so a lot of how well I do in LPL sometimes comes down to who the random matchup for a given round is!

Round Five of LPL7 is running over on Lead Adventure as you read this. Round Five is one of the Theme Bonus Point rounds, with this round’s theme being “Historical Civil Wars”. That’s right up my alley, so go see how my Russian Civil War figures are faring this week!

More Pulp Figures goodness from last week’s LPL round. This crew of underdressed primitives was started sometime last year, finished over the winter, and have finally gotten their moment of glory, beating a very nice little regiment of 15mm Napoleonic figures in the third round of LPL7.

The Shaman’s Crew, all from Pulp Figures. Click to view full-size.

Round Four is going on as you read this, and can be viewed over on Lead Adventure. Alas, the Thuggee figures I’ve fielded in Round Four aren’t doing as well as the Neanderthals did. Perhaps they’re overdressed?